Friday, March 1, 2013

Dogs categorize each other by sight

If you have a dog, then you’ll have
noticed that your dog always shows great interest in any other dog he meets
regardless of how physically different the second dog might be. A person who
had never seen a dog before would hardly lump an English Mastiff and a Chinese crested into the same species, yet dogs seem to know one another. While it’s
likely that much of that recognition is due to scent, that’s not all there is
to it. Dominique Autier-Dérian of the University of Paris and her colleagues
showed that dogs can categorize other dogs by sight alone.

The scientists chose nine adult dogs
as their test subjects: seven crossbreeds, a purebred border collie and a
purebred Labrador retriever. After being trained to select the image of a dog
over that of a cow or of a food dish, the real tests began. The dogs were
presented with two computer screens, one showing a dog and the other a non-dog
from one of forty species, including cats, rabbits, birds and humans. 3,000
images were used for each category (dog and non-dog), only twelve of which had
been used in the training sessions. Thus, the vast majority of the images were
unfamiliar to the dogs. The dogs’ task was to pick out the dog’s faces, if they
could.

Three discrimination tests using a
dog and a non-dog.

Animal cognition PMID: 23404258.All the dogs were able to put all kinds of dogs into
the category ‘dog’. I should point out that not only were there no non-visual
cues, but all the images were headshots that were manipulated to be the
same size on the screen. Yet, with that limited amount of information, the nine
test dogs were able to generalize about what it means to be a dog. Despite the
extensive physical modifications dogs have undergone over the years, they know
each other when they see each other.

Stochastic Scientist? What's up with that?

Why the Stochastic Scientist? As I'm sure you all know, 'stochastic' is another word for 'random', which is what I intend for the focus of this blog. Although my formal training is as a molecular biologist, there are many other fields of science that are also fascinating and beautiful. It's my intention to blog about which ever scientific discovery or invention catches my, and hopefully your, fancy.

I also hope to inspire people to learn more about science. By choosing among a huge variety of scientific endeavors, I'll undoubtably hit upon something that will pique my readers' interest.

I guess I could have called my blog 'The Joy of Science', but that wouldn't have been quite so random.